Amy’s Journal by Amy Fusselman

I can tell you that loafing in my studio is lots more fun than clocking into an office every day. Amy, you want a serious answer? It is interesting. Critics are the only honest people left in the art world, yet they're immersed in ontological doubt -- as my kid once said to me, "you get paid for looking at art?!" Artists labor under their own kind of contradiction, in that they embody creative freedom yet are all but required to produce the same kind of thing over and over.

The core of her book is less about tidying, in my view, than the power of imaginary play: to take an object, feel it, and then decide its fate, is to become the all-powerful parent who can disregard, or even “discard" a child—(for a newer model, perhaps)—or not. Kondo's brilliance is in creating a ritual in which the “parent” who has this terrible power—and mind you, this is every parent—is imbued, via her script, with only a loving consciousness.

Art is not literal help, like giving someone money on the train. But for the times when there is no help except the way in which an individual can turn her life around by changing her view of the world---in that moment, art can be a god. That is why I am always comforted by art, and I always want to hear about the ways in which an artist teaches herself to see differently.